In a bash-script I wrote I had a stupid problem with the “<<” (here document) operator. And this is only because I am too structured I wanted to write an ftp-call inside a for-loop, something like that:

#!/bin/sh
for filename in `awk '{print $1}' /my/directory/myfilewithfilenames.dat`
do
    ftp -n <<EOFTP
        open my.ftp.host
        user myusername mypwd
        put $filename
    EOFTP
done

Do you see the problem? Well, it is simply, that the end of “here document”, the “EOFTP” must not be indented. It must look like this instead.

#!/bin/sh
for filename in `awk '{print $1}' /my/directory/myfilewithfilenames.dat`
do
    ftp -n <<EOFTP
        open my.ftp.host
        user myusername mypwd
        put $filename
EOFTP
done

This cost me half a day. And it is so ugly, insn’t it? I think I don’t like shell-scripting at all. I will return to python, or maybe perl, whereever I can. Grmpf.